Snow

Can’t remember the last time we had snow before Christmas, but this year we’re making up for earlier mild years. The snow hit us on Tuesday and at varying rates its been falling since then with no sign of a thaw. Today (Thursday) we have about a foot of snow between the house and the hutch.
Post has been delayed, although we’ve had a couple of deliveries today and yesterday its been nothing like normal volumes. Parcel post and courier deliveries have disappeared which is probably just as well as between here and the nearest main road we’ve got a lot of snow. Judging by past experience we won’t be gritted here until tomorrow at the earliest.
We have been able to get through a lot of work, but not as much as in normal days. Might sound wimp but its just been so cold even though the heating has been going full blast. We are hopeful that we’ll be back to full production from tomorrow.

Aperture Updates

If you have a Mac and use Aperture, either in connection with your own digital photos or with photo scanning, download the latest update to Aperture. I’ve noticed a few problems of late, particularly corrupting images as they’re loaded. The update seems to have fixed this.

iPhoto Trash

Busy week, photo scanning like crazy. Even did some for clients, not just friends and neighbours. Then there’s the “Could you just ....” which in this case was “knock up” a couple of slideshows. So I spent a few evenings using iPhoto and Aperture to create something impressive. That’s by the by, the point is I suddenly got a message on my MacBook suggesting I was running out of disc space.
Quick run around the usual places to free up space yielded little, then I remembered that neither iPhoto nor Aperture actually delete files from your hard drive when you move them to Trash within the application. If you look under the File menu in each there’s a command which does delete unwanted images. I guess it’s a double failsafe function but one that’s all too easy to overlook. Me included.
What struck me was all the scanned photos that were lurking in purgatory - nearly 3000 in iPhoto and a massive 7000 in Aperture. Now all gone, permanently.

Re-thinking jpg compression

Mention the term jpg and in some quarters you can hear the disapproval down the phone line. Why? As all too many people know jpg compression ruins photos.
Really?
I will accept that if you want the maximum, in terms of available data, then a TIFF file is better. However we charge more to scan to a TIFF, reflecting the time taken, impact on data storage costs, number of DVDs we burn and the time that takes too. But ask yourself, is it really necessary? Will you really edit your photos that much?
The received wisdom against jpg goes back a long way, IT is a fast moving field. A slide scanned today into a jpg file can’t be compared to one made 5, 10 or 15 years ago. Today’s jpgs are much better than their critics believe, if you doubt it give it a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

What can be done?

When it comes to negative scanning the vast bulk of our work is scanning 35mm material, but we do get many other formats - including some that are smaller. It’s a basic rule that the smaller the original the poorer the enlargement (all other things being equal). What can be done to make the best of small source files which appear excessively grainy?
We use a great piece of software that can be used as an add-on to Photoshop and Aperture. This reduces grain and at the same time improves sharpness. It can work wonders on grainy scans, or scans with excessive noise, and it gives good results just using the default settings. It’s called Neat Image, and I believe you can download a trial version at no cost.

iPhoto Ate My Hard Drive

We scanned a very large number of photos and slides for a client, she was kind enough to say she was happy with the results which she was going to load into iPhoto on her sleek new MacBook Air.
Having done that she wasn’t so happy. She complained that having loaded all the digital images she had no hard drive capacity left. Why?
I did some digging and found out how iPhoto treats the photo loading process. When you Import photos iPhoto actually copies each image from the source file into its own library, our client had taken a two step process. First, she’d copied all our files from the DVDs we supplied onto her hard drive. Second, she then imported into iPhoto. All went well and naturally she assumed the “source” files were those she was seeing in iPhoto. But the whole process had eaten twice as much disk space as necessary.
Solution - simply delete the copes of the photo scans we’d done. Disk usage back to a sensible level.

35mm Slide Scanner Amnesty

Today we launch a scheme to enable people to turn their cheap, nasty little slide scanners into valuable credit to use against professional scanning. We’re doing this to show people that the rotten results often delivered by these devices (blotchy shadows, bleached out highlights, artefacts, poor quality) is not representative of what a top flight scanner such as our Nikon’s can deliver.
The Amnesty allows a full credit (purchase price incl. VAT, postage) for USB 35mm scanners against scanning services for 35mm slide, 35mm negatives or prints. Details on this page - 35mm Slide Scanner Amnesty.

Unanswered Email?

I’d like to apologise to everyone who sent us an email in the last few months and didn’t get a reply. It seems that several hundred messages got stuck somewhere between our website and our mailboxes here. I’m now assured by our ISP that everything is OK, and I’ve gone through the backlog to apologise.
Please get back in touch via our contact page is there’s anything outstanding.

Backsides?

We’re a photo scanning service, sure, but did we go for the right name?
In the main we scan photos, most of them taken within the last few years. Increasingly we’re scanning photos that have historic interest. This is mainly relevant to the family owning the photos but we hope that as the Historypin service takes off we’ll be scanning photos with wider historic significance.
It’s noticeable that in so many cases the back of the photo is at least as interesting as the image on the front. Yesterday we scanned a collection including a 1927 photo taken at Southend airfield. It’s of an ancient bi-plane; the pilot is wearing a leather flying helmet, he has two passengers - one is bare headed the other is wearing an ordinary hat. They’re all waving at the cameraman. Ready for take off into grey Essex skies, the flight of a life time.
On the back are some notes. This was the plane in which an aunt took her first flight. The name of the pilot was there and indeed it was signed by him. Was this aunt’s first and last flight? Who was the Captain, a jobbing commercial pilot or a retired World War 1 air ace?
We can scan both sides. Maybe we should call ourselves the bothsides photo scanning service.

Historypin - Sunday Times

Interesting story today in the Sunday Times magazine, p22, by John-Paul Flintoff titled ”Our Ghosts in the Machine”. He covers several approaches to putting historic images on the internet.
Scanning through the article you’ll notice it covers Historypin in some depth, although sadly he doesn’t mention that we’re the official photo scanning partner for the service. The article looks at other ways of adding a historic dimension to modern images and locations. On the opening two pages you can see a great spread of images taken from Historypin which will inspire many people to look at the main site, as of this morning showing 10,966 photos.
Inspired, you might want to join in, I hope you do. If you don’t have your old photos available in a digital form contact us.

How Good is a Scan?

As a photo scanning service it’s hard to explain to people how good a scan is prior to them getting it. It’s also tough to find some measure potential clients are familiar with to express the quality, say, of a 35mm scan.
On Friday I came across the Panasonic stand at the Goodwood Festival of Speed where they were promoting their new Lumix range of top quality digital cameras. Looking in the detailed specification it gave the image dimensions in a measurement that meant something to me. Their top of the range camera delivers 4000 dpi.
They quote the camera as being 12.1 megapixels - so there it is, 1Scan photo scanning at 4000 dpi is equivalent to a 12.1 megapixel digital SLR.

Spy Photos

Big news on TV last night and in the papers this morning, the arrest of ten people in the USA on spy charges plus all the cloak and dagger world of passwords, message drops and being undercover. Yes, the photos too.
One of the people accused, according to The Times, sent messages back to Moscow inside otherwise open source images available on the internet. So today I’m sure someone will ask me how. The answer is complex and involves an awful lot of maths but it is perfectly possible. This field of mathematics is called steganography and I’m sure there are web sites somewhere that explain how it all works. We looked at it some years ago as a way of embedding data inside an image to enable copyright owners to prove, without doubt, that any given image was “theirs”. We dropped it as there were more manageable ways of achieving the same end.
If you’re tempted to add data to an image (but not encrypted to spy standards) just get to grips with metadata, you can easily add date, place, subject data and even a few personal comments.

Historypin

It’s a couple of weeks since the launch of Historypin, and our role as photo scanning partner. I’ve been following the publicity Google / We Are What We Do have been getting for this venture.
The response on dozens of blogs has been universally positive, exciting many people imagination about the role of photos to bring people together across generations. Many of these blogs have been by UK publishers but there has been significant interest from around the world.
Historypin prompted a lively debate in Australia about privacy, with many positive ideas about how good the concept is. But consistently people want more photos on the site. Well, the answer is in our own hands - put your photos on the site or better still send them to us so we can scan them for you.

Apple TV and Scanning

I’ll admit photo scanning is fundamentally dull. We scan photos all day and its only music that keeps us sane. Which is a shame because photos - scanned or otherwise - are such a tremendous source of enjoyment. Music and scanned photos combined are a powerful combination.
Enter Apple TV. Connect it to your TV, log onto your home wireless network, fire up iTunes and very quickly you have a tremendous outlet for your scanned photos, digital images and your favourite music. Using a very simple interface you can look at any of your photo albums (folders on your PC) either on a photo-by-photo basis or by pressing one button, as a slideshow. You can link this to a music playlist in iTunes and in a few seconds a collection of photos on your computer appears as a fantastic display on your lounge TV. Quick, easy and brilliant resolution.
Apple TV also lets you watch internet movies from YouTube, listen to music from your iTunes library, and view videos you can rent from iTunes Music Store.

Yes we can scan glasss

Amazing phone call yesterday, someone has come into possession of a couple of thousand glass plates taken in the early part of last century. Which prompted the question - can we scan glass plate images?
Technically we can. For 35mm its quite common to get the slide sandwiched between two tiny sheets of glass. No problem scanning those. We can scan bigger images in glass but due to the problem with newtons rings we’d need to do a test first.

Historypin

It’s official - 1Scan is the photo scanning service for Historypin, a clever new photo sharing service jointly developed with Google.
Yesterday we were invited to the launch event. Around 200 people gathered at the Royal Institution in London for talks about the service and demonstrations after. We tried hard to resist clicking on the page that links to our site, but you can by clicking on the 1Scan photo scanning page.
We have some great postcards produced to publicise Historypin and we’ll be sending those out with scanned work.

Historypin

From the Ingear section of today’s Sunday Times:-
“As with any digital advance, for every step forward by one company, there are dozens of smaller web outfits eager to enhance and customise the function. Historypin for example is a British partnership with Google that allows users to upload old photos of streets and buildings to create what it describes as a ‘digital time machine’. Call up a modern Street View shot and you can click on a building and drill down through its history, as seen in archive photographs enhanced by text reminisences from the people who worked in them.”

Welcome

Today we welcomed a new member of our photo scanning team - a new Coolscan scanner.
We need this for several reasons. First, it will help us keep pace with growing business volumes. Second, it adds to our ability to keep scanning slides and negatives should one of the other units fail. Finally Nikon aren’t making any more dedicated 35mm scanners so the chance to acquire one is hard to pass up.

Tiff? JPG?

Simple question - when we can scan photos into either file format, why go for one rather than the other? And this applies to photo scanning, slide scanning in 35mm and medium format.
Let’s get rid of one of the “old wives tales” of photo scanning, that saving a file as a jpg ruins its quality. Well that may or may not have been true a few years ago but I don’t think anyone seriously worries about that now.
The main benefit of jpg files is that they are very much smaller. That can make a very big difference in the time it takes to open or edit a photo. Bigger files rapidly eat up CDs, DVDs or hard drives. Even with a powerful modern PC manipulating a TIFF image from, say a medium format negative, can be a significant task. Maybe OK if you’re just editing one image but suppose we scan 100 or more?
For the vast majority of not only our clients but scanning service users and photographers in general I’d say jpg is more than adequate. If you plan to do heavy editing and you have access to lots of computing horse power TIFF may be the option.

Hi8 to DVD Conversion

Fateful thing to say, as I did on Friday, “Haven’t seen many Hi8 tapes lately”. Just as well as our global HQ is presently stuffed with VHS tapes we’ve been converting. Two of the biggest tape to DVD conversion projects we’ve taken on.
To answer me we got a batch of Hi8 tapes in the post on Saturday morning, at least the postman was amused to get me out of bed before 08:00. Then on Sunday, thankfully in the afternoon, two calls just to check we’re still converting Hi8 to DVD. Yes, we are.
The other question asked was about taking the converted DVD containing the footage we’ve converted, and then turning that into a computer editable file. Yes, you can do this and you can download free software for either PCs or Macs that will do it for you. We recommend Handbrake, give it a try.
For our own purposes we use paid for software from Xilisoft. They have a gigantic range of PC, Mac software to rip DVDs into files ready to edit or play on virtually any platform including iPods and iPhones. One advantage of Xilisofts offerings is the catch-all term ease of use. Once you’ve got the hang of it you can quickly configure their code to rip DVDs into any format. Then there’s the elapsed time taken to convert a video. A two hour home movie tape can take up to 11 hours to convert if you use Handbrake on a less than modern PC. Even our multicore PCs struggle to get significantly under the 120 minute mark with Xilisoft but my gut feel is its around twice as fast as Handbrake. For us time is money, so Xilisoft got the vote.
If you’re thinking of ringing today yes, we’re still converting Hi8 to DVD, along with MiniDV, VHS-C and ordinary VHS.

Which scanner?

We buy a lot of our equipment through Amazon. It’s the first place I look, not just when buying books but for computer kit too. They won my loyalty for life a couple of years ago when they were endlessly patient with the useless Nikon APS adaptors which shred their gears after one or two rolls of film.
I’ve bought a couple of scanners from them so every so often I get marketing emails telling me which scanners are popular. In fact I got one this morning, so which scanners are popular?
From the top ten six aren’t really scanners, they’re these multi function printers with a scanner tagged ontop. primarily aimed at document scanning they’re easy to sneer at from a “pro scanner” view point. Actually, they produce more than acceptable results. Every so often I read of someone asking how they can scan negatives or slides on one. The short answer is you can’t, to scan slides or negatives you need a light source above the target, which is not how these units operate. Simple photo scanning and they’ll be fine.
Two manufacturers take the other positions - Canon and Epson. Both manufacture what I’d call “serious” scanners but their top end scanners don’t appear in the listings. However the popular units do have the additional light source which will enable you to scan slides and negatives. If you look at the raw specs of these units you’ll get a pretty decent scanner at a modest price.
Why pay more? Well there’s the obvious of getting a higher quality image but beyond that there are two features worth investing in. Speed is the first, you’ll be amazed how long it takes to scan a collection of 35mm negatives or 35mm slides so it makes a big difference if you can do 8, 12 or more in a single batch. Second, the technology that automatically removes dust and scratches which will save you hours and hours in post processing. Epson use Kodak’s Digital ICE while Canon have their own alternative called FARE.

Photo Scanning Volumes

We get asked all sorts of questions, no problem with that, photo scanning is not something everyone knows much about. But whether it’s really basic (“Can you scan colour and black & white?”) or up to the highly technical (“How do you set a black point?”) one of the most frequent areas of questioning is how many photos can you scan?
At the moment we have a major job on, we’re scanning a family archive for a large family whose fortunes have left them dispersed around the world. We’ve done thousands of slides and negatives, just at the end of last week we started on the prints.
Anyone who has thought about scanning will tell you prints are the worst. Negatives and slides can often be batched up so you can do a strip, a batch of slides or maybe even a whole film roll in one session. But photos are often seen as a one at a time exercise. Yes, if you do that yourself you’ll quite possibly never get to the last photo album.
Thankfully we have a high speed photo scanner in the shape of Kodak’s s1220. Not only does it do a great job (specially in restoring faded colours) it scans very, very quickly.
So next time someone asks me how many we can do in a day I can tell them we did nearly 4,000 yesterday. We could have done more, but 4,000 high quality photo scans isn’t a bad days work.

Kodak - Photo Sharing

One of our greatest assets is Kodak - of course we don’t own Kodak, we just own some of their scanning technology. One of the best features of being connected with Kodak is the tremendous confidence our clients can have in our photo scanning service because we operate under the Kodak label.
Equally I’d have to say Kodak don’t have the racy, cutting edge image held by some companies. Kodak’s great but they’re not Facebook. But Kodak are about to launch a great new advertising campaign based around the theme of sharing. For us it’s a revelation, and very well timed. We scan photos, that’s the core of our business, but our clients typically want their pictures scanned so they can, yes, so they can share them. Thanks Kodak.

Photo Scanning Service - No1 in Switzerland

Photo scanning services are international - photos and digital photo files are the same the world over, no need to translate the language, rewrite a manual, a smiling face is a smiling face in London, Lisbon, Los Angeles or Lagos.
We have photo scanning clients from several parts of Europe. We’ve scanned photos mailed in from Belgium, France, Germany and part so Scandinavia ( Norway, Finland and Sweden ). One great feature of billing in PayPal is that we can invoice in sterling and clients can pay in their local currency.
We haven’t targeted our marketing at Europe, we focus our efforts on the UK, but I did notice on Friday that for some reason Google had ranked us No 1 for “photo scanning” and “photo scanning service” in Switzerland. I was surprised as I’d expected those places would go to a site describing photo scanning in French, German or Italian. Thanks Google, it was nice of you.
You can imagine my surprise when the post on Saturday included a parcel of photos to be scanned from a client in Switzerland. Our first Swiss photo scanning order.

International Print Service

Photo scanning, negative or slide scanning - it is usually done for a reason. I often think of “fancy” applications like acrylic mounted images but in reality the most popular use of a scanned photo is simply to produce other photos. Yes, photo scanning is often a gateway to photo reprints.
What if the people who want reprints are abroad? Well, if you take advantage of our free online album service you can give access to your images to anyone you choose. Once online they can pick the images they like, the size and quantity they need and place an order. Our service has a worldwide fulfilment capacity so they’ll get what they want wherever they may be. Oh, and they can pay for reprints directly.

Photo Scanning - the Olympics?

Photo scanning - what’s so great about that? I was floored by the question, in all honesty ensuring thousands of photos run smoothly through our scanners isn’t the most exciting thing you can spend your life doing. But after scratching my head I came up with some ideas.
First - volume. OK, it’s dull, but we suffer the dullness so you don’t have to. We are great facilitators of thousands of images per day moving from dull old photos to sparkling digital files. And they’re all the right way round.
Second - we revive faded colours. Time takes its toll but with the press of a button we can bring back much of what faded away.
Third - on line albums. Increasingly people are pleased with the online albums we create for them. Looking at the site stats they’re using these free photo albums to share memories all over the world. Yes, and they’re free.
Fourth - customer feedback. We like it when we get positive feedback about the photos we scan. We know that going from a hard copy photo into a digital photo world enables people to enjoy their images in new, creative ways.
OK, photo scanning will never be an olympic sport but it does deliver real benefits to a lot of people, and we help thousands of photos each week become safe from fire, flood and disaster.

You and The Queen on Stamps?

Standing in the queue in the Post Office I was distracted by their rolling display, and something they call Smilers. It’s the most brilliant idea.
You can find out more at the Royal Mail web site (royalmail.com) but in essence you supply an image and they’ll print that image next to a proper postage stamp. You stick them both side by side on your letter, in great colours too. What a brilliant way to add a personal dimension to your mail.

Bridge to Photo Smiles

We scan through thousands of photos each week and it’s great to know our work is appreciated. Earlier today while looking through our website logs I came across this post on a client’s blog, which is on the Ecatsbridge website..

It is the day of the Portland pairs, the National Mixed Pairs Championship, which is scored by ECatsBridge, so even though it is a Sunday we are here in case we are needed ... which is  a bit of a pity as it is a lovely sunny day. So I am dealing with some emails first, but then while I wait and I am going to do a bit of gardening (with my mobile phone at my side!) then spend some time tagging photographs. We got loads of old pictures scanned recently – a great company called 1Scan (http://www.1scan.co.uk/) ... some of the pictures had a dreadful colour cast and they fixed them beautifully. So now I have to get them into some semblance of order so we can find the ones we want !

Photo Scan with Grain Reduction

We’re in the memories business - we scan photos that mean a lot to people, and in the case of 35mm slide scanning images our clients may not have seen for years. In most cases our clients are very happy with the results.

I wouldn’t say the call was from an unhappy client but it was unusual because the client had a working slide projector alongside a new digital projector so he could see the original 35mm slide and the scan we’d done last week. In the scanned image he could see grain (in the sky areas) whereas in the true projected 35mm image he could see no grain (just an unbroken spread of blue). Why?

A long conversation followed, one I won’t try to summarise. It is an odd fact of high quality digital imagery that scanned 35mm originals often show more grain than appears from a projected image or from a print. It’s hard to get your head around but grain can be more visible in a 4000 dpi scan than in a 2000 dpi scanned photo.

In this case the solution was to run the original scan through a great piece of software I often use for my own images, it is Neat Image. Versions are available for Mac and Windows. It does a great job of smoothing out grain in large areas such as expanses of sky. I emailed the corrected slide over and in a few minutes our client was as happy as we want you all to be. I’ve tried the built-in filters in Photoshop but I think Neat Image is better, producing a less “waxy” effect in skin tones, and well worth the modest cost of the package.

Photo Montage

Earlier today I spent some time with a client for whom we scanned a couple of thousand photos. Part of the conversation related to his success with photo face recognition using Aperture on the Apple Mac, but we also touched on photobooks and an innovative gift he’d created for an elderly relative.

Inspired by an old favourite family photo he wanted to create a formal looking group shot, with around 15 “people” - I put it that way because these “people” are in fact the same person. The baby, the toddler, the teenager, the young adult, the proud parent are all the same person. It’s a clever idea, it’s based on a number of design elements. The backdrop was to be a photo of the family home extracted from a 35mm slide of the family home, dating back to the 1950s. The individual images of the person were taken from multiple different photos, the intention being to use Photoshop to cut / paste. Off he set, until he ran into problems.

For example, the images had to be scaled. In fact most of the pictures made the subject look about the same size so the kiddy shots had to be shrunk and the adult images scaled up. Then it seemed that these people were strangely floating in space, oddly disconnected with the ground they were intended to be standing on. While it was a brilliant idea execution proved to be far harder then a willing amateur was able to deliver. Oh, and the shot was getting very, very wide.

He had to admit defeat and managed to track down a skilled Photoshop image editor overseas. He took the scans, did some Photoshop magic and created a great composite family grouping of a well grounded set of images of the same person. Complete with lighting adjustment and shadows. The final image ended up being nearly three feet wide, making a stunning wall hanging photo, but also posing a major problem. By this time the birthday deadline was fast approaching and they didn’t want to risk air mail from down under. They found a printer within driving distance of my client who ran off a copy of the print on a massive Epson printer.

Result - a great gift, an excellent bit of Photoshop magic, and an example of international team work made possible by the internet.

We're Back

Just a quick note to say thanks to all those who rang to say 1Scan.co.uk website was down.

Yes, it was planned although it did take longer than I’d hoped. It’s part of our plan to add photobooks to our offerings and I know this bit of pain will be worthwhile.

Why Aperture 3 from Apple MATTERS

You may not have noticed but Apple have just announced a new version of their photo organising / editing software, Aperture. You might not use but this is important, I’ll tell you why.

Apple is a market savvy company. Just look at the iPod, those cool MacBook laptops, all that brilliant placement in trendy films and TV shows; Apple knows technology and what people want. So when their flagship product includes a raft of new features it’s worth taking a closer look. Two areas are, in my opinion, are really interesting for you and me, “ordinary” photo collectors and photographers.

Like me you’ve got photos (digital) that you’ve taken recently, another batch that you took using film or slides that you’ve had digitised. Then there might be some family photos you’ve inherited, plus all those you’ve been sent by family members - 1,000 - 2,000?

What’s on them? Yes, loads of landscapes but mainly people - faces. That means that the main questions you ask are who? and where? To help you answer these questions Aperture now offers two features, facial recognition and geo-tagging.

Facial recognition is simple in concept but difficult to implement. The ideal is that you take one image and add the name of the person in the photo. Apple’s software then scans through your image library and identifies all other photos of that person either alone or in a group. Think how long it would take you to do that by hand. Work your way through your key family members and in a couple of hours all your portraits are “tagged”. That means you can quickly identify all the photos in your collection of the people who are nearest and dearest.

Geo-tagging means you can drop your images onto a map and Aperture makes a note of where that photo was taken. Again, a quick and effective way of adding vital data.

Put the two features together and you can brilliantly answer all those who and where questions.

Just now Apple are ahead of the wave when it comes to feature rich photographic applications, but expect it to appear in more products in the coming months.

Scanning Time?

We're often asked how quickly we can scan a batch of photos, invariably the answer is much, much quicker than even the most dedicated traditional scanner operator. Let's take a batch of 500 photos, and a decent scanner being operated by someone familiar with the scanner and its software. Every time a scan is made the lid has to be lifted, photo(s) placed on the glass, and then the scan(s) made and the digital files saved.

If it takes as little as 1 minute per photo that gives a simple elapsed time of 8 hours and 20 minutes. If you add in a few minutes each hour to rest those straining eyes you could easily be talking about 10 hours. Very few people will sit scanning for that length of time, and probably don't have the time anyway. If you could manage a couple of hours a day you’re looking at a week of lost evenings or a solid weekend of grind. Even the most dedicated family member or photo hobbyist will find this a tedious burden.

From recent experience 500 photos isn’t a massive library. Last Thursday we were given a batch of 1100 photos that need to be scanned ready for our client on Tuesday. Yes, it has been done - it was polished off on Friday. DIY that would have been some 17 to 20 hours of work for a busy Mum with a young family. I’d suggest that a scanning bill for £110 is a modest price to avoid all that grind and lost family time.

APS Film Scanning

I still shake at the memory - a couple of years ago a client asked us to scan about 50 APS films. We had never scanned APS before but I knew Nikon offered an adaptor that converted our Coolscans into APS film scanners.

So at some considerable expense I bought one.

It did three frames before giving up the ghost. I got a second, that did better, almost reaching the end of a film before expiring. The third scanned a couple of films (rather slowly I thought) before it too headed to the great APS graveyard. Nikon, Amazon and their pro supplier in London were very good about it but I ended up wishing we’d never agreed to scan the things in the first place. So I removed APS from our shopping list of capabilities.

As soon as you do that you know the demand will come back even if just to torment you, as it has, consistently. Finding a solution has been very difficult, APS is virtually a dead technology and dedicated APS scanners are yesterdays news. So we scratched our heads and we’ve come up with a solution.

So APS film scanning is back on the 1Scan film scanning menu, and our APS price list. And we now smile happily when APS cartridges arrive in the mail.

Photobooks

No, we don’t do photobooks - at the moment. But wait ...

Earlier today I met a company that produces photobooks, and I was blown away. They’re a gem of a team, a fantastic blend of traditional book publishing, craftsmanship and decades of attention to the detail of making high quality books.

Yet here they are grabbing new technology in the shape of top quality digital image printing and combining it with their book building tools. It’s a fantastic combination and the books are superb.

I’d love to be able to offer our clients - and those for our free photo scanning service - the opportunity to get their scans made into top quality photobooks. So watch this space.

Alternatives to Scanning

Had a call from a potential client asking for advice - she had some precious photos that a relative wanted to take overseas. Naturally she was reluctant to let them go, but couldn’t afford the cost of Royal Mail Special Delivery both ways and scanning. What could be the alternative?

We came up with a couple of ideas. First take the photos to a local photocopier and use that to make copies. It’s quick, low cost and if the copier is decent the reproduction should be passable. Obviously this doesn’t deliver digital images it would produce a copy of the images which could be taken abroad safely.

The second option would be to use a digital camera to take a photo of each page of the album. A decent camera will focus quite close so you will get a photo of a photo. The key to getting a reasonable result is having a good camera and getting the lighting right. This cold winter light should give a decent result.

Nikon Woe Gone

The Nikon medium format scanner arrived, and has gone.

It was dead on arrival. That’s the risk you take with secondhand equipment but luckily the vendor was one of the decent people on eBay and we were able to resolve the issue very quickly. But that’s not what I wanted to say. While it was here I contacted a Nikon authorised repair shop and asked for a ballpark figure for fixing it - this is the story.

The unit powered on and went through its POST (power on self test). Green slow flashing lights to begin then a short series of rapid green flashes before returning to solid green. I have been told by the Nikon repair man that any pulse of rapid green flashing during POST indicates a fault. Flashing at the end indicates logic board issues.

My computers could tell a Nikon Coolscan 8000 was attached but nothing could be done to bring it to life.

The Coolscan 8000 has a main computer board holding its logic and that was most likely the cause of the failure. To replace that would cost some £350, plus, £100 labour plus shipping / transport there and back. Oh, and don’t forget VAT now back up to 17.5%. So the repair bill could easily be over £500. That’s not far short of what these units sell for on eBay anyway. Compare that with the cost of a comparable top-flight Epson and draw your own conclusion, I did.